


A Brand New Box of Matches

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode AU: s12e10 The Timeless Children, Gen, Other, Talking Too Much, and getting his mouth stepped on, and his plans foiled, or are they?, the Master in the paralysis field
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:34:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26431237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: The only cure for excessive exposition is to recruit Missy to step on the Master's tongue.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), The Master (Dhawan) & Missy, The Master (Dhawan) & Thirteenth Doctor
Comments: 9
Kudos: 14





	A Brand New Box of Matches

It’s a familiar footfall that carries to his ear, a familiar boot that follows it into his eyeline: his own boot, elegant and dainty and indestructible as TARDISshell, laced and re-laced every day for a regeneration of days, lovingly polished sometimes-but-not-always by the hand that tightened the laces. The Master, unable to move or raise his head, stares at it. 

Missy tuts.

“It’s all gone wrong again, hasn’t it?”

You have no idea.

She drops suddenly to his level, a rush of skirts brushing the rubble, the dirt and the destruction disappearing beneath the mantle of unstained fabric. 

She hisses into his face, savage. “This is our _home_. This is _Gallifrey_.”

“And what's Gallifrey?” he manages to say. It’s rhetorical, and sardonic, and somewhere under it, in a way more truthful than any imposed lesson, without hope, and his tone puts an unease into Missy’s eyes. The Master smiles. “I think it’s pretty.”

She slaps him. 

The blow lands, but with little sting. The angle is too oblique, his head against the ground puts his cheek too close to the surface below it to allow a swing with any follow-through. 

Missy’s arrival at the last minute is a surprise, an unexpected guest appearance in a story from which he’d thought she had made her final exit. He’d thought there was no place for the acquiescent, hollow self she’d become. He’d thought she was tame and clawless and dangerous for having allowed herself to be caged, to be swayed, to be cut down. He’d thought she was naïve. 

Always, before, naïve. A fool.

But not completely clawless, as it turns out. The dear little trimmed fingernails with their childish dark lacquer can still scratch. The little hands, the sinewed arms, the breathtaking quickness—she used them all against him when he thought it was just him and the Doctor (and his crew of robo-Masters), and now he’s the one in the paralysis field, flat on the floor, fighting its stranglehold. He blinks eyes he knows are dark and wide at her, wondering if she’d gouge them out, as he’d like to, if he showed her what he’s seen. 

“I think it’s better like this,” he teases. “You’ll think so too. Soon.”

There’s no harm in telling her whatever he likes. She won’t remember it. Only now is he recalling her appalled incomprehension, her anger, which he’ll goad until she strikes out again. Then she’ll use that lovely boot on him. 

It glints as she shifts it closer to his face. 

“Have you had a proper look around?” he asks. “There were only two places outside the Citadel I made absolutely sure to go.” 

He wrenches a hand free just so he can hold his fingers up.

“Out there, our house is on fire. Our lands. The cradle of our childhood dreams. That beautiful old lab equipment we loved so much. The family records. The biodata, the chronicle, all the history of all the holdings. All the furniture, all the artifacts. All the knowledge.” 

“And here I thought I’d grown out of my pyromaniac phase,” Missy interjects, but her voice is tight. 

He inhales as deeply as he can. “Can you smell it? Can you smell the smoke? Can you hear the screams still echoing in these corridors? I did that. I made them. Every person you killed before this and repented of, wept for, was as nothing compared to the work I’ve accomplished here, on our own planet.”

Of course she can hear the screams. She’s a telepath, isn’t she? _He_ can hear them, can’t he? And he remembers her horror, creeping up on him, bleeding into his nausea like a bolus of acid. These are their own people whose flaws he tried to excise so unsuccessfully—though in retrospect, explosions make poor scalpels—and whose tailings and talents he’s wrapped in tin and tinsel like so many shiny, useful toys. 

Missy spares a glance for the unconscious Doctor. “The second place?”

“Of course. Of course, it’s about her,” he confirms. “It always was. Only now, I finally know why.”

He can feel her reluctance to ask the question. Her understanding, gleaned from observation of him, from what he’s done, that she doesn’t want to know what he’s learned. 

“Where does regeneration come from? Those later years with the Doctor, playing around with his life like it was nothing, flaunting it, _edging_ — That feeling, every time, of something else, pushing in, wanting and waiting to break through…”

“The Doctor’s never been good at regeneration.”

“ _Exactly_. And why?” 

A sweet and hesitant wrinkle graces her forehead. 

The Master counts on his fingers for her, butchering her adopted patter before he slides sneering back into his own, up-to-date voice. “The Doctor isnae guid at regeneration. The Doctor’s not good at, oh, control...recovery...manipulation. In fact, the Doctor isn’t good at a lot of things Time Lords are meant to be good at. The Doctor’s different. And it isn’t down to some cut-rate homebrew ‘born in a manger’ nonsense. In fact, it's like the Doctor isn’t Time Lord at all.” 

He catches a glimpse of her face going pale before she’s on her feet again, stiff but also swift as at her arrival. 

“Shut up,” she says, “stop talking.”

“Afraid to know the truth? You’re getting it anyway—”

Before he can go on, she puts her foot on his mouth. “I said, stop.”

He starts to laugh, somewhere in his chest though he can hardly feel it through the dragging dampening of the paralysis field. He’ll spoil this for her, as everything has been spoiled for him, forever… 

“And yet,” he pushes, inexorable, “how many opportunities has the Doctor been given? While _we_ —”

“That’s just favouritism.”

“Favouritism? For the Doctor? No. While we graft and grub for every moment of life, the Doctor throws it away like it’s so much tat. Like it’s the worst imposition. A punishment, a tragedy, a fate quite literally worse than death. While we dream of life and eke out survival, the Doctor bucks under its yoke and bursts with it, stronger than ever, every time. We’re better at it, but it eludes us. The Doctor runs from it, but it’s a fundamental condition of her existence, inseparable from what she is.”

He savours it, forms the words lovingly in his mouth. “It _comes_ from the Doctor. All the Doctor can do is live. Without the Doctor, all we can do is die.”

“No.” Missy’s shaking now, tight with the tension of holding her foot atop the Master’s face and not stamping hard on it while he grinds out the merciless truth. She’s full of something that’s past anger: fear, perhaps, though not yet the revulsion he can’t escape. 

“No,” she says again, and presses down, the sole of her shoe like the tip of an iron against the soft part of his cheek, where tissue covers teeth and bones meet underneath. His jaw creaks. His mouth opens. It’s better than biting himself, bruising the easily-damaged flesh inside, bursting it. 

He wraps his hand around her ankle.

She presses harder, and this limits his air. His primary airway, already constricted, has to work harder, as though to prove his point. 

“Fundamentally,—” 

Missy eases her foot back, willing to listen after all, or unable to resist it— 

“We’re no better than all those other species. The ones that we’re better than.”

The Master rolls his eyes up to look at her, to watch it hurt her. His voice has turned into a whisper. “There's a worm in us, and she's the fruit we never should have eaten. She's a discarded windfall, tossed into the midden, and our ancestors thrust their hands into that stinking rubbish and plucked her out and sank their teeth, so eagerly, into the rotten flesh. The juice ran down their chins, staining us forever.”

Missy withdraws, for the moment. Recoiling, questioning.

“Never mind how this could be. The Doctor came before us, the Doctor precedes us. The Doctor might as well have made us.”

“‘Might as well’ have made us?”

“Well, someone _else_ took the secret of life from her. Someone, a lot of someones, swallowed the worm. No Doctor has the competence to splice into our stock the alien material that formed the means for regeneration.”

Missy’s staring at him, bloodless, both hands fisted into the fabric of her skirt. He’s so happy.

“There! I’ve spelled out the unfathomable, awful, filthy thing. Do you want to punish me? Would you like to stamp into this very ground the tongue that spoke it, kick the teeth against which it formed the sounds?”

He knows she wants to, and still she does nothing, doesn't move. The Master leers at her, teasing, cunning. 

“I saved them, our people, after I killed them all. I couldn’t burn them. And I'm so glad I didn’t. Because look! I’ve made them better. Do you like the collars? I designed them myself.”

The robo-Masters wouldn't act against Missy, not without an explicit instruction. She is the Master, after all. Now, though, she gets a good look at them, stood there waiting, always watching, blank and passive and aware.

“Oh,” he rhapsodises, as though it were the greatest discovery. “You _can_ hear them screaming; that's not an echo at all. Master, Master! Pain! Pain! Pain! Pain! Pain! Pain! Pain—!”

But he doesn't get through his thirteen iterations, because finally, finally, Missy moves again, her shoe on his lips, catching one under its sharp bowsprit, pulling it, stretching it, smearing it, rolling, on the ground to show his gums and his teeth. 

She doesn't kick them, but she pushes her toe between upper and lower jaw, introducing her boot into his mouth. He imagines it tastes of everything she's trod on to get to him: gritty, burnt building material, wastewater, pulverised rock, though really, he's too busy registering the discomfort to taste it. It does fill the space below and in back of his nose with leather and shoe polish. 

"Enough!" 

Missy flattens his tongue beneath her sole. It's twisted it so that he's licking her, or would be if he could move it. His jaw is wide to accommodate the girth, and she's used her shoe like a paddle to depress his tongue into position, straining the root, ripping the connection underneath, inside the skin, with the loosening pop of perforated paper.

"I should cut out your tongue, and if you were anyone else I would.” 

She rocks her foot back and forth over it instead, her teeth gritted. All sorts of liquids are coming out of his face.

They’re interrupted by a groan. 

Missy turns sharply, but of course, it’s the Doctor, coming to. The Master can no longer remember which of them knocked her out in the altercation, only that one of them did, knocked her out, made her fall, made her irrelevant, removed her as a subject from their consideration. Missy takes an aborted step in her direction, torn like she would go to her but knows she can’t. 

“She’s going to blow it all up,” he says thickly, “by the way. Wipe out all living matter on this planet. With her little bomb. Ha! Isn't that funny? I think it’s funny.”

The little bomb has fallen out of the Doctor’s grasp and rolled beyond her fingertips. She’s reaching for it almost before she has her eyes open, searching with her fingers. Missy plucks it up. The Doctor makes another sound that might be an objection.

Missy examines the device, prying away the Cyber-mini, working it out from under the gaffer tape. Some airless, familiar disappointment sinks into the Master’s gut when the pieces separate. Missy turns the main explosive over in her hand. 

“ _This_ bit isn't anything to look at, just a torch casing with a firework inside.” She peels the heavy tape with ease from the cylinder, addressing her observations to the gawping Doctor. Her playful tone belies the hard and urgent anger still in her eyes. “Did you steal this tape from the production crew? It wreaks havoc with the budget, you know.”

She makes a face, mock-stern, lower lip jutting. 

Missy taps her fingernail once on the button, but then tosses the whole thing clattering away. “So if it’s not the important part…” Then she’s holding up the tiny lone Cyberman, and the Doctor is struggling to her hands and knees. 

Everything in the Master wants to come between them. Yet however much he might want it, his own paralysis field is holding him in check. Missy is watchful though—just as the Doctor lunges, she dodges out of the way. 

“I'll just slip this into my pocket for safekeeping.”

The miniaturised Cyberman, the death particle, disappears between folds of cloth. 

The indecision is so obvious on the Doctor’s face: appeal to Missy, to the Missy of the contrition and the unhappy pliability, the watchful, possibly listening Missy? Or hold on to the conviction that she’s been lost, thrown over, or never existed at all? 

It’s all down to the regeneration, and this one doesn’t want to give the Master the benefit of the doubt.

“CyberMasters!” the Master calls. His disciples come to quizzical attention. Always so slow, my Lords of Time. “Shoot her! Shoot—”

Missy stamps her foot down on his throat, crushing the words. The Doctor leaps into the shadows after her weapon; it arcs through the air, beeping; the pressure on the Master lets up, not just on his throat, but all over his body. Missy’s released him, and just in time, because all three scramble as far from the line of CyberMasters as they can, and it’s not an all-consuming explosion, but it’s enough to flush shrapnel and hot fast air through the chamber, catching them all by the shoulders, throwing them.

Then the Master lands on his feet, and he’s running, and he’s aware as he reaches the door of a dormant TARDIS that they’re running too, each solitary and determined.

He slams the door and he’s away, staggering, clinging to the centre console. Aside from the reassuring sound of the ship’s well-ordered dematerialisation, there’s only the rasp of his breath, his chest finally free and his windpipe ragged. 

When he laughs, it’s a pained, hoarse thing.

He touches his throat, his bruised lips. He shifts on the legs that don’t really want to hold him up, remembering the ripe-fruit feeling underfoot, the resistance of cartilage, the impossible size of the words that couldn’t be silenced.

He drops his hand and reaches into his pocket. He rubs his fingers over the lucky figure he keeps at the bottom of it, talisman carefully transferred from coat to coat.


End file.
